Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) talks Kanye West collaboration
“I was in New York in January and I got a call from my manager and he said Kanye West wanted to maybe use “Woods” as a sample.” I was like, “Yes.” A week later there were more murmurings and eventually I just got on the phone with Kanye. We ended up talking for a half hour about music and how we were fans of each other and Avatar. It was a really pleasant, easy-going conversation between two people that are pretty psyched about music.
He was like, “I like how you sing so fearlessly. You don’t care how your voice sounds. It’d be awesome if you could come out to Hawaii and hear the track, and there’s some other shit I think we could throw down on.” I was just like, “Yeah, cool man!” I surprised myself by not being nervous or apprehensive. I said, “When should I come out?’ And he was like, “How about tomorrow?”
So I head out there and he plays me the track and it sounds exactly like how you want it to sound: forward moving, interesting, light-hearted, heavy-hearted, fucking incredible sounding jam. It was kind of bare so I added some choir-sounding stuff and then thicked out the samples with my voice. That whole first week I was there we worked on the “Woods” song, which is called “Lost in the World”. We were just eating breakfast and listening to the song on the speakers and he’s like, “Fuck, this is going to be the festival closer.” I was like, “Yeah, cool.” It kind of freaked me out.
After that first week he was like, “I want you to come back.” So I came back a few weeks later and it was the same kind of thing, throwing ideas around— there are a bunch of other songs I’d just throw down on, write a little hook, whatever. In the studio, he was referencing Trent Reznor, Al Green, the Roots— the fucking awesomest shit. It made total sense to me.
I asked for a separate studio because I’d do so much overdubbing to get my ideas out. So I ended up recording in this tiny back room, and then Kanye would come back and listen to what I came up with, and then we’d work on changing the lyrics. We’d just sit there and collaborate. It was fucking fun, man. A-Trak was out there, Nicki Minaj. Just a bunch of über talented people and everyone was really nice and chill and just working on Kanye’s record. I was literally in the back room rolling a spliff with Rick Ross talking about what to do on the next part of a song. It was astonishing. Kanye came back and was like, “Look at you two guys. This is the craziest studio in the Western world right now!”
